Shakuhachi Notes

Unfortunately, I don’t know of any reputable place to buy shakuhachi in Singapore. I bought my yuu from shakuhachiyuu.com and my bamboo 1.8 from shakuhachi teacher David Sawyer’s website japanshakuhachi.com but that was a bit iffy (via Skype my teacher could not tell if my flute needed adjustment, or if it was only my poor playing!), yet thankfully it has been tested and found excellent by two visiting masters as well as one of our own Singaporean dizi players who studied under the Tozan ryu to a high level. My bamboo shakuhachi’s joint was loose, but this was repaired for free by Ichijo Kobayashi (or his son) when I visited Japan last year.

I always feel a bit sad when I check some of the shakuhachi blogs that I used to follow and find that they are still dead. I hope it is because the authors simply did not have time or inclination to update them, rather than because of something more sinister, or because they have stopped playing the shakuhachi.

Introducing GVIDO Digital Music Score Reader

When a friend of mine shared an article (Dual Screen 13.3 Inch Sheet Music Reader Announced) about this digital music score reader, I was intrigued. It is basically two large e-ink screens connected to form a single reader. A check of the measurements show that it would fit very nicely on my music stand.

Having used a Kindle for many years, I really enjoy the experience of e-ink for reading compared to conventional screens as used on ordinary tablet computers and smartphones. The GVIDO reader is apparently touchscreen, allowing page turns by pressing a designated area along the right edge of the right screen (and presumably left edge of the left screen for a page turn back). It allows for annotations of the score to be done with a stylus of some sort. With two screens instead of one, the number of page turns required is halved, which would be far more convenient when playing music than with only one screen.

I wonder if they will have a side-lit one like the newer Kindles such as the Kindle Paperwhite. This could come in handy when playing in dimly lit locations, though the typical concert musician would play in a brightly lit area so this is not a dealbreaker.

Of course, one of the first questions on my mind was whether there would be support for shakuhachi notation, and while I have not received a response to my query, it seems that the scores can be provided in PDF format, so there should be no issue. Presumably they can also be provided in an e-book specific format such as epub, though I wonder how annotations would work.

So, lesson #58 was on 21 December 2015. We were both delayed by illness, if I remember correctly.

I am back from my hiatus! Then again, it is not like I stopped playing shakuhachi; I merely stopped updating this blog because I became lazy, then when I wanted to update, I got intimidated by the backlog and allowed it to spiral out of control.

On Sunday, a new member joined the small Facebook group I set up for shakuhachi players in Singapore. I promptly contacted him, and it turns out that he was making his early foray into the shakuhachi world. I offered to meet up for a practice session with him, and so we met on Tuesday night.

We went through three of the lullabies/folk tunes from Chikuzen’s shoden book (Hinomaru, Ouma no Oyako, and Yuyake Koyake). His interest in shakuhachi originated in honkyoku, so when I played the first part of Kyorei, he got really excited and decided that he would attempt the piece. Knowing that Chikuzen sometimes starts beginners with Kyorei, I guess this bodes well for him. In fact, he even bought a repertoire book of honkyoku including the likes of Koku Reibo, which is beyond my current skill level.

My hope is that he will persist in learning shakuhachi, and then I will have a regular practice partner as he seems quite keen for regular sessions. After all, I am still lagging in my quest for the shoden certificate, and I guess helping him to learn what is in the repertoire will help me master it, or at least give me an incentive to practice more diligently.

Kiku Day shared this instructional video with the comment:

Hōgaku Journal has uploaded this wonderful video of how to play and study the min'yō piece Nagamochi uta from Miyagi prefecture. It is a takemono - or a  piece that is either a singer accompanied by shakuhachi or played as a solo shakuhachi piece. Follow the score and listen well to get the feeling!

I had this lesson today, or rather yesterday (17 November). We went through the entire Kurokami. As Michael noted, the notes are generally easy to play, and there are basically two speeds at which they are played: slow and slower. So, it is mostly about getting to know the piece, i.e., the rhythm and such.

Watch out for the 3/4 beat notes: I tend to play them at 1/2 beat.

The ハ following ヒ on line 8 is a 五のハ

The ending should follow the classic ending for this piece, i.e., instead of ヒレツレ play リレロツレレ

鹿の遠音 (Shika no Tone) played by Yoshimi Tsujimoto

Various copies of the video of the cover of Smooth Criminal by Yoshimi Tsujimoto and her associates were unfortunately removed at the request of the copyright owner. It seems rather silly that they did not capitalise on it instead by getting people to be redirected to their own version of the video, and hence earn advertising revenue as recompense.

Thanks -- or no thanks -- to a change in Daylight Savings Time in the US, my lesson started at 11 p.m. for me on 3 November 2015, ending within the first 20 minutes of 4 November. I got disconnected early on, and then Skype refused to show my video stream, but it was nothing the traditional restart incantation could not fix.

We revised two duets and part of one sankyoku: Fukuda Rando’s Komori Uta, Yamabiko, and the first three lines of Kurokami.

Notes for Komori Uta:

Play the score for shakuhachi #1.

In its full length, the piece is played until the middle of the fifth column, and then repeated from the top of the third column until to end, skipping the second half of the fourth column.

The handwritten notation is a little confusing, so I must take care to differentiate リ and ウ

The メ marks in the score can be hard to see.

The note at the start of the sixth column is 三のハ

Notes for Yamabiko:

The note that looks like a ‘#’ in the first two columns is actually a チ with vertical tempo lines through it.

In block #2 of column #2, ヒ is played as a trill by alternating holes #1 and #4.

Be careful of changes from kan to otsu within a quick succession of notes.

Work on changing to otsu ロ at the end of phrases where kan ロ is played. It can help to fine-tune my embouchure to direct the air stream towards the inside of the flute for otsu and towards the blowing edge for kan.

Notes for Kurokami:

Playing the ハ grace note for ハロ with holes #1 and #5 open and the rest closed is fine.

五のヒ is another name for イ

In the middle of line #3, watch out for the チ that is corrected to ウ

Towards the end of line #3, there is a triangle indicating that the preceding ロ is to be played at 3/4 beat. Unfortunately, the breath mark was incorrectly placed before this triangle when it should be placed after the triangle instead.

I bought a Korg CA-1 chromatic electronic tuner a few days ago as I got tired of my previous tuner which needed to be clipped somewhere for it to stand properly. This new tuner, on the other hand, can rest on the bottom of my music stand.

The cons of this new tuner versus the old tuner:

More expensive: 18 SGD versus 15 SGD

Not back lit

No metronome

The pros:

Rests on the bottom of my music stand

Bright LEDs to tell me if I am too flat, too sharp, or just right.

Plays reference pitches that I can cycle through by pressing the SOUND button.

Using the reference pitches and double checking with my old tuner, I discovered that my smartphone’s DaTuner Lite app is terrible as a tuner. Might be a matter of the hardware or software configuration, but I shall avoid it now that I know.

This lesson was on 20 October 2015. Yes, my lesson logs have finally caught up with my lessons! Hope these will not be famous last words...

Following the theme of revising the shoden repertoire in preparation for testing, we went over Kyorei and Banshiki. In retrospect maybe I should do Honshirabe instead since it is supposedly the first honkyoku piece in Dokyoku style that I learned, but no big deal I suppose as I will no doubt return to the piece later.

If you have been following this blog since 2010, or more likely read through the archives, you will know that Kyorei is the very first piece that I ever attempted to play on shakuhachi. Coming back to it was a great experience in that I could tell that I certainly am a better player than I was from years back, but it was also humbling because I stumbled over the part with repeated ロ大メリ、ロ in nayashi. Michael opined that that was the most difficult part of the piece. The key here is getting the bell of the flute up and lowering my head for ロ大メリ, then getting the bell back down and doing the looking in the top corner trick so that the ロ sound is not flat.

I am happy that I remembered quite a bit of Banshiki even though I only practiced Kyorei before the lesson. The main stumbling block was actually my tendency to drag out notes (as per Kyorei) when the score indicated that they should be cut off quickly. Another problem was that at some point my kan register イ would drop to the otsu register when I repeated it. This is probably just a lack of focus.

Well, I have much to practice. Maybe I will go over these again for my next lesson, and then go over a duet or even a sankyoku. Speaking of sankyoku, I am undecided: I am most familiar with Sandan no Shirabe, but Kurokami is a classic.

Cover of Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal by Erina Ito (13-string koto), Yoshimi Tsujimoto (7-hole shakuhachi), and Yuko Watanabe (17-string bass koto)

I was alerted to this soon after it went viral on Facebook a few days ago, having been uploaded by a Michael Jackson fan site apparently based in Brazil. It was wonderful to see so many friends and strangers sharing and liking a cover done with traditional Japanese instruments.

It was difficult to find out more about the players at first because the information on the shakuhachi player was wrong (the bass koto player’s name was given instead), and the koto players were not named. However, a friend of the players commented, giving me a lead to find out about Yoshimi Tsujimoto. I have added her website to my list of links here. (I believe her surname is Tsujimoto, but although I prefer to render Chinese and Japanese names in traditional format, I used the “Western” format for her name and those of the koto players as it appears everywhere I have seen.)

Unfortunately, the video was taken off Facebook (certainly not at the players’ request: Yoshimi Tsujimoto shared this video too), but thankfully not before this copy was uploaded to YouTube.

This lesson was started on 22 September 2015, but due to a problem with my Internet connection, we ended up postponing it to 29 September.

As I had decided that I will prepare for the test for the shoden certificate, the lesson had a change of pace from the previous few lessons: we went back to the shoden repertoire book. Since the section for pieces composed by Fukuda Rando consisted of a grand total of two pieces, I decided to revise them as I would have no choice anyway.

The first piece was Tsubaki Saku Mura. Personally, I feel that it has something of a catchy tune that I like. The features of the piece that I need to work on would be the various series of fast notes. Other than those it is not difficult.

The second piece was Yugure Genso Kyoku. Actually, I do not think I learned this piece, so it was more of a first run through rather than revision. The interesting part about this piece is that it sounds like a “normal” piece by a Japanese composer, but following Fukuda Rando’s preferred ABA structure, the “B” portion is a surprising Russian waltz-like sequence.

One thing that does trip me up is the ハ note used in this piece, as in ハロ. There are multiple ways of playing ハ, and I do not always remember which to use, and sometimes it doesn’t matter. For this piece, Michael suggested two ways:

Holes #1, #3 closed; holes #2, #4, #5 shaded.

This lesson was on 1 September 2015. Yeah, It is 3 a.m. and I am trying to clear my backlog of lesson logs. This lesson was yet again about Hifumi Hachigaeshi.

We started off with some discussion about the kinds of lessons that Michael offers besides online lessons. In particular, I was curious to find out about students who stay over at his place for intensive lessons over a week or a weekend. He suggested mid May to early October as being a good time to come over. From late October to April, snow could be a problem for transportation.

We also discussed what would be required to obtain the shoden certificate. Michael’s requirement is basically to play two pieces from each section (one for sankyoku) at that level, to his satisfaction.

Michael also shared a funny anecdote when his teacher fell asleep while he was playing San’an. After his teacher woke up, his teacher exclaimed that he played the piece better than any of his other students!

This lesson was on 18 August 2015. It looks like I forgot to record video, so I only have an audio recording of this lesson. No matter.

We went through Hifumi Hachigaeshi again in the lesson. It turns out that there was an “extra” page that was missing from the score in the repertoire book that Michael gave me. This page contained an addition to the original score that was labelled “Araki Chikuo’s Originality”.

Eh, speak about procrastination: this lesson was on 28 July 2015, but here I am blogging about it in October. Unfortunately, I forgot the exact points I wanted to review and my recording had a problem midway, so this is like really brief.

I chose to revise Hifumi Hachigaeshi. It was really just going through it again, getting my mistakes corrected phrase by phrase. I have been avoiding this piece partly because I just did not like it, but going through it again, it began to grow on me. I guess this is the effect of getting better at playing: when I’m having less trouble, I likewise tend to enjoy myself more.